


if one thing had been different (would everything be different?)

by sinceregalaxy



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Brienne is mostly exasperated, F/M, Jaime is a landlord/handyman, the inherent romance of falling water
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:14:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25761190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinceregalaxy/pseuds/sinceregalaxy
Summary: Brienne called the landlord and he arrived a few hours later and fixed the sink while Sansa did homework and Arya watched him suspiciously from the dining table. And when he was done he told Brienne to have a nice rest of her day and to call him if they had any other issues.Nothing out of the ordinary.Except that the landlord wasn’t just anybody. It was Jaime Lannister.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 76
Kudos: 228
Collections: Jaime x Brienne Fic Exchange 2020





	if one thing had been different (would everything be different?)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JustWriterBritt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustWriterBritt/gifts).



> Written for the Jaime x Brienne Fic Exchange 2020! This is my first time participating in something like this, and I had a lot of fun writing this story.
> 
> Happy reading! Prompt is at the end :)

The universe has it out for her. 

Of that, Brienne is certain. 

It’s the height of summer, the temperatures have been consistently hitting a hundred degrees, and now the AC is busted. Again. 

And then, of course, _he_ is outside, and she has a perfect birds eye view from her third floor window. Him and his stupid shirt that he cut the sleeves off of to show his ridiculous arms that are actually _glistening_ in the heat. She hates how he struts back and forth across the lawn in front of her apartment, mowing the same grass he’s mowed about every other day this summer. He nods along to music that isn’t there, and she does not want to speak with him now, or ever again, if she could help it. 

But her room is seriously hot now, and she knows she’s going to have to ask. 

She closes her eyes, takes a steadying breath, and throws open the window. 

“Hey, Lannister!”

Jaime shuts off the lawn mower before looking up at her. He grins when he realizes it’s her. “Well hello there, twinkle toes. What can I do for you today?” he says cheekily. 

“The AC is broken.”

He tsks. “Again? If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you keep breaking things so I’ll come up and visit you more often. You know I’d do that even if there weren’t anything to fix.”

The man winks, and Brienne hopes she’s flushed enough from the hot weather that he can’t see her blush. “Whatever. Can you please just come up here as soon as possible? I’m dying of heat exhaustion.”

“I would love nothing more,” he says. “Just let me finish up here.”

Brienne nods and goes to lie down on her bed. She leaves the window open, grateful for the slight breeze. She closes her eyes and listens to the lawn mower and Jaime’s whistling. After a few minutes she hears, “Hey, Lannister.” Davos, probably taking his dog out for an afternoon walk. “Isn’t this about the fourth time this week you’ve mowed this area? I swear I see you here almost everyday.”

Jaime laughs. “Yeah, it’s weird, huh? I’ve never seen grass grow this fast, and it only seems to be this one spot.”

Brienne grabs a pillow and shoves it over her face to muffle a groan. 

Yeah, the universe hates her. 

::: 

It all started with the kitchen sink. 

It was only a minor issue, a slow drip that Arya was the first one to notice. Then Arya told Sansa because Arya thought Sansa would handle it. But Sansa said she was too busy with her summer classes and so Arya should deal with it. But Arya hates talking to people in general, so Arya ended up dumping the issue on Brienne. 

So Brienne called the landlord and he arrived a few hours later and fixed the sink while Sansa did homework and Arya watched him suspiciously from the dining table. And when he was done he told Brienne to have a nice rest of her day and to call him if they had any other issues. 

Nothing out of the ordinary. 

Except that the landlord wasn’t just anybody. It was _Jaime Lannister_. Who apparently had taken to running one of his father’s properties after dropping out of college a few years ago. 

Jaime Lannister, once the star pitcher at her high school. Who she’d figured would be long gone playing pro in some big city by the time she moved back home after graduation. 

Jaime Lannister who came waltzing into her apartment to fix her sink, grinning like he wasn’t at all surprised to see her. Who called her twinkle toes like he always used to. Who laughed at her slack jawed expression and stuttering words before he twisted a few pipes under the counter and then left on his merry way like they didn’t spend half of high school glaring at each other from across the halls. Like he didn’t show up to half her soccer games just to shout insults at her. Like they didn’t almost both get suspended over a competition for the best grade in their junior history class. 

Like they didn’t basically hate each other for four years. 

Needless to say, she was a bit thrown off for the rest of the day. But by the time she went off to work the next morning, she had settled down. They were both adults now, and he was just the landlord. It’s not like she would see much of him. 

But as the days got longer, things around the apartment _just kept breaking_. 

It was almost to the point she was seeing him everyday. 

Whether she saw him through the window while he was mowing, or passed him while he fixed the touchy sprinkler next to her parking spot, or stood right next to him while she told him the problem with the shower — Jaime was always there with a teasing grin and his old baseball cap tugged on backwards, ready to help and aggravate her in equal measure. 

And Brienne was just about at her wits end. 

:::

Jaime does come by and fixes the AC. Brienne sits in front of it as soon as he leaves, letting the cool air brush delightfully over her skin. And she prays to every one of the gods that nothing else breaks down for the rest of the summer. 

Of course, it’s too much to wish for, because not even a day later she notices an issue with her bedroom light. 

“I swear it’s not just the light bulb,” she says, opening the front door to let him in. “I’ve put in five new bulbs, and none of them work. It just keeps flickering.”

Jaime nods, and follows her down the hallway to her room. “Yeah, don’t worry, I know you wouldn’t call me unless something was really busted.”

Brienne pauses at his tone, less teasing and a lot more dismal than she’s ever heard him before. “Oh... uh, well, it’s in here,” she says and opens the door. 

He steps up onto a stool he brought and gets to work, taking off the light cover and pulling some wires out of the ceiling. Brienne watches him from the doorway, leaning against the frame. He’s tall enough that he doesn’t need to go up on his toes at all to reach. His red shirt is riding up, revealing tan skin and taught muscle that she forces herself to look away from. His hair sticks out at all kinds of angles from under his KLU Knights hat. 

But what sticks out most to Brienne suddenly is that he’s using his left hand for most of the work. He almost always favors his left, now that she thinks about it, which doesn’t make sense because — 

“Why did you leave?” she blurts. Jaime eyes flit down to hers, surprise written into his features. “School,” she adds. “Why did you leave school?”

He exhales heavily, and then looks back up. “Hmm. Well. I was pitching for KLU, which you probably already knew. And one day my arm, well. It wasn’t feeling right. The coaches knew that, but they kept putting me in the game anyway. The team needed me. And I didn’t complain because I wanted to help, we were favored to win the Series that year.” He pauses as he twists a couple of the copper wires together. “And then one day I just... threw a pitch, and I knew it was over. Hasn’t been the same since.” He wiggles his right arm and smiles sheepishly. “And, you know, there’s no place on the field for someone who can’t throw, so...”

She takes a moment, processing his words, trying to reconstruct the Jaime in her head to fit the one in front of her. The one who loved baseball more than anything. The one who pushed himself so hard in school just to prove a point. Who she never saw give up on anything. “And you didn’t... stay to finish your classes or anything?”

He twists his lip, shoving the wires back into the hole in the ceiling. “No, I didn’t. I just. Needed to get out of there. You know?”

She nods, crossing her arms tightly while he finishes. 

“Besides,” he says, tone brightening, as he jumps down from the stool. “If I had stayed in school, I’d be living it up in some corner office, wasting away in a fancy chair. And then who would fix your light?”

Jaime flicks the switch and beams at her when the room is illuminated. Brienne finds herself smiling back. “Thanks, Jaime.”

“Anytime, twinkle toes.” 

:::

The next few weeks are oddly... pleasant when it comes to Jaime. The apartment continues to fall to pieces — water leaking through the ceiling, mold in the shower, a quiet but annoying ticking sound coming from the fridge. 

She feels less hesitant about calling Jaime each time. And when he begins to back off on his ceaseless teasing, she starts to roll her eyes less, and she finds they can actually talk to each other. 

Jaime likes to tell her stories about some of the other tenants in the complex. How Jojin’s living room has plants covering almost every square foot of floor space. How one of Danearys’ dogs almost knocked him out of the third floor window while he was trying to fix her window screen. How he once caught Petyr sneaking around the main office building, trying to steal someone’s mail. 

He mentions how his brother is set to be valedictorian when he graduates high school, and how proud he is of that. He doesn’t talk about baseball much, but once she gets him to recount the perfect game he threw, which was just a few weeks before he threw his arm out. 

And in turn, Brienne lets herself open up to him about a few things. Why she chose to study engineering in college. Tales from the sorority house she somehow was convinced to join. How she moved back to their hometown to be closer to her dad before he died. 

All around, it’s been nice, and she finds she really likes talking to him.

:::

“How’s Jaime?” Arya asks one night at dinner. 

Brienne blinks, the fork she’s holding pausing halfway to her mouth. “Oh. Um, I think he’s good?”

Arya narrows her eyes. “That’s it?”

“What else do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know,” she shrugs. “What he’s been up to lately. If he has any vacation plans. How his dog is holding up in this heat.”

“Jaime doesn’t have a dog.” 

“Hmmm... so you do know some things about him?”

“You do seem to spend a lot of time with him,” Sansa cuts in from across the table, not even looking up from her phone. 

“I do _not_ spend that much time with him,” Brienne insists, feeling a blush start to blossom over her cheeks.

“But he’s over here like, all the time,” Arya says, picking up her glass of milk. 

“That’s just because everything in this godsforsaken place won’t stay together.”

“Exactly. So he’s over here all the time.” She takes a sip. 

“I _can_ always hear guys talking, you know?” Sansa adds.

“So?” 

“ _So_ ,” Arya says, setting her glass down gently, “I want to know how Jaime is. He’s over here all the time, and you usually talk to him for a while. Which means I think you can give me a better answer than ‘he’s fine.’”

“Yeah, well. I guess I can’t.”

Brienne stays silent the rest of the meal, stares resolutely down at her plate. She tries not to notice the knowing looks Sansa and Arya give each other.

:::

They don’t ever talk about high school. Jaime tries to bring something up every so often, but Brienne is quick to steer the conversation in a different direction. 

The last thing she wants to think about when she’s with him is high school. She _likes_ how they are now. The talking. How he’ll wave at her when he sees her carrying groceries in. How he’ll stop to say hello when they’re both passing through the laundry room. Most days, she thinks they might even be friends. 

On less days, she’ll even let herself admit she might even want more than _friends_.

But the friendship they’ve made and the fantasies she’s built in her head could all come crashing down if he keeps trying to remind her of the past. The harmony they have now makes it easier to forget everything that came before. The insults. The unspoken competitions. How “twinkle toes” was just another clever way to call attention to all her flaws.

Even if when he sees her now, he still thinks “tall” or “beastly” or whatever else he used to say, at least he isn’t saying it now. 

Their hesitant truce, the easy conversation, and the steady rapport they’ve built over the summer — she can live with it, and it’s almost enough to make her forget. She’s glad for it. She believes people can change, and it seems she and Jaime have turned over a new leaf. 

But he _just_ keeps bringing up one thing or another, and she begins to suspect that he’s doing it on purpose, trying to throw off the balance. Trying to remind her what’s under the shaky ground they’re standing on. 

:::

It’s a cooler morning, a break from the constant heat they’ve had all summer. Brienne had been looking forward to it the whole week. She had the day off and brought her book and a blanket outside to read on the lawn in front of her building. 

Just as she is getting to a good part, she hears “Don’t mind me, Twinkle Toes,” from her right. Glancing up, she sees Jaime kneeling down next to a sprinkler head with his tool box. “Just here to fix this piece of crap again.”

She isn’t really surprised to find him out here — that sprinkler had been touchy all summer. She nods, and they chat whenever she’s at a breaking point in the book and while he digs around the sprinkler. 

Jaime curses suddenly, and she sees that the sprinkler is starting to leak. It’s slow, but enough that it’s starting to fill up the hole he dug and soak his jeans.

“Do you need help?” she asks, closing her book and setting it down next to her.

“No, no. It’s fine.” He waves his dismissal and grabs a wrench. She watched him try to stop the leak for a few moments. “Hey, I just thought of this, but remember that soccer game you played in? Maybe... junior year?” he starts to say suddenly, digging his hands into the puddle to fiddle with the now buried sprinkler head. “The one where the sprinklers started going off in the middle of the third quarter?”

Brienne tenses. She remembers that game. 

“I remember all the other girls started screaming and ran off the field, but you kept playing. Right up until the refs had to drag you off. And once the water was finally shut off, you went out there and won the game. It was… It was amazing.”

She couldn’t say she agreed with that sentiment, because after the game all the boys said something about how she should have left the field sooner, that way none of them would have had to see her in her soaking wet, white uniform. And later Jaime had sought her out to ask when she started doing wet t-shirt contests.

It wasn’t really a pleasant memory for her. 

Brienne realizes that she can’t do this. She can’t be friends with Jaime and just forget about four years of her life, or ask him to forget. It’d be impossible. 

“I’m gonna go,” she says, and stands up abruptly. 

“Seriously?” he says, fumbling with the sprinkler.

“Yeah. Um... good luck with that.” And she starts to walk away. 

But she doesn’t get far before Jaime shouts angrily, “What in the hells is your problem?” 

She stops and turns around. “Excuse me?”

He still has his hands in the puddle, trying to stop the quickening flow. “I mean, seven hells Brienne. It took months to get you to even talk to me. And then when I think we finally start heading in the right direction. When you might... I don’t know. Like me? I bring up something from high school, and you completely shut down. Just rip the rug right out from under me.”

She scoffs in disbelief. “What do you expect me to do?”

“I don’t know. Reminisce about the good old days with me? Tell me why you won’t talk about it or—“

“The good old days? Seriously?” She’s fuming now. How could he imply that—

Suddenly, what was once a small puddle in the grass has erupted into a tall spray, arcing far above their heads, covering the area in a thick cloud of water droplets. They’re surrounded by the water, the sun refracting through the mist and spreading rainbows all around. 

Jaime stumbles quickly away, his clothes already soaked through, and hers are too. They stand there in shock, staring at the broken sprinkler and the plume of water.

“Are you going to fix it?” she asks after a few moments. 

“Hmmm… No,” he says quietly, continuing to watch the disaster unfolding before them.

“What?”

He turns to her. “Not until you tell me what’s wrong.”

“What? Jaime, no.”

“Brienne, yes.” Jaime crosses his arms and waits.

“You know I could just leave?”

He just shrugs. “You won’t.”

She sighs, collecting herself. “In high school. We hated each other.” They needed to have this conversation one way or another — it might as well be in the middle of a cloud of non-potable water. 

His face scrunches up. “Did we? I don’t recall?” He sounds… surprised. Like that was the last thing he expected her to say.

Brienne scoffs. “Really? You don’t remember junior year history class? Or the time you brought a sign to my game that said ‘all hail the beast.’ Or how about all the times you decided to insult my hair, or... or my body. In front of everyone.”

His face begins to fall. “Oh. Brienne I —”

“Or how about how ‘twinkle toes’ is really just another insult wrapped in prettier paper. Or how —”

“It’s not. It’s not Brienne, please. I promise just... just give me a moment.” He pushes wet hair out of his eyes, rubs his face, beginning to look distraught. He takes a deep breath. “Firstly, I never hated you,” he begins. 

“Well, then you didn’t do a very good job of showing—”

Jaime holds up his hand. “Please... just let me finish before you say anything else.”

She nods, “Fine.”

“I never hated you. Never even close to hated you. I always... liked... you. And eventually I even more than _just_ liked you, but you were always so... you always seemed too good for me. I was afraid to talk to you, most of the time. But I wanted to know you better. Be your friend. And so I guess I spent a lot of time trying to get you to talk to me. I’d hoped you’d want to be my friend, too. But I guess I didn’t do a very good job.”

Brienne has to take a moment to digest this, her whole perception of those four years beginning to shift. He liked her? The whole time? She runs through every moment in her head, seeing it all in a new light. 

“But you... How could...'' She struggles to find the words. “Why didn’t you just talk to me? You know, nicely?”

He laughs, bitterly. “I was a stupid boy who didn’t know how to express his feelings. What else is new?”

Brienne nods, still trying to process. And she was beginning to remember other things now. Things she had pushed down because they hadn’t seemed important compared to the rest. How he always waited to walk with her to the parking lot, even if he teased her the whole way. How he seemed to always ask her when he needed help with writing assignments. Every soccer game he showed up to. All the times he came dateless to school dances, and how he would find her sitting on the sidelines. 

Maybe she was too blind to see it then — couldn’t see it, even if she wanted to. Because back then she never would have believed it, that Jaime Lannister could somehow _more than like her_. It would have defied explanation. But now… now...

“And what about now?” Brienne finally asks.

“Now...?”

“How do you feel, right now?”

He swallows, looks like he tries to start about a dozen sentences, water dripping down his face like a hundred teardrops, his eyes brighter than the rainbows around them. In the end, he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he takes two long strides forward, grabs her by the shoulders, and kisses her under the falling spray. 

Her heart lifts just as her stomach seems to fall. His fingers press tightly into her skin, his lips gentle and soft against hers. And even though it’s sprinkler water and not falling rain, it still feels pretty fucking magical. 

He pulls away slowly, rests his forehead on hers. “That’s how I feel now,” he whispers against her cheek. 

She grins, incredulous. Finally feeling like the ground underneath them has fully leveled. She lifts her hands up to his face, pushing strands of soaking golden hair behind his ears gently. “Now,” she says, “will you please fix that godsdamned sprinkler.”

Jaime laughs, plants one more on her, and says, “Anything for you, twinkle toes.”

::: _1 month later_ :::

“Jaime.”

“Hmmph.”

“ _Jaime_.”

“Hnnn just five more minutes.”

“You can have as much time as you’d like, just give back the stupid covers.”

Jaime groans as he rolls over, finally seceding some of the sheets back to Brienne. 

The weather has grown cooler in the month since the _sprinkler incident_ , as Jaime had taken to calling it. Not much else has changed. Things around the apartment were still breaking. Jaime would still come around and fix it, and they would still talk amicably as he took apart and put back together whatever he needed to. But afterwards, instead of packing his tools and heading straight for the front door, he would pull her down the hall to her bedroom to make out for ten minutes before he moved on to the next job. 

Brienne still hasn’t told Sansa or Arya yet. She’s not sure why--probably just not ready to face the questions or the knowing looks. She likes the little bubble she and Jaime have built around themselves. Still, Jaime has been nagging her to let him stay over once in a while. And yesterday she finally gave in, so they spent the night whispering and kissing and trying to mute their laughter so as not to wake her roommates. 

Now it’s 5 am on a Sunday, which means they both have the day off and can sleep in. And that’s exactly what Brienne intended to do until the warmth and shelter of the covers had been so wrongfully robbed from her. She is almost able to fall back to sleep, when she hears an odd tinkering sound coming from outside her room. 

Brienne tries to ignore it at first, but the longer it goes on, the more annoying it becomes.

“Jaime do you hear that?” He grunts quietly but doesn’t move. She taps him in the forehead. “Hey, wake up.”

He bats her hand away. “Later. Sleep now.”

Brienne sighs and decides to go investigate herself. She follows the noise to the kitchen and finds Arya with her head hidden in the cabinet beneath the sink. 

“Arya?” Brienne says suspiciously.

“Huh? Oh, fuck,” she whispers loudly as she hits her head trying to come out from under the sink. She rubs her head as she recognizes Brienne. “Oh, um. Good morning.”

“What are you doing?”

“Oh... Well I was doing dishes and I... realized there was a problem with the sink and so I decided to try and fix it?”

“Uh-huh. Why were you doing dishes at five in the morning? You’re never up this early.”

“That’s not true. I uh... just... started a new exercise routine! Yeah. And I have to get up really early and make a protein shake before. So... that’s why I was doing dishes.”

Arya is clearly lying, and Brienne is just about to call her out on it when she hears a whisper, a very clearly male whisper, from the hallway. “Brienne? Where’d you go?”

Arya’s head snaps towards the voice, and Brienne knows her eyes have gone wider than a deer’s in headlights. She knows the jig is up. There is absolutely no way she’s getting out of this one, so she doesn’t even try to stop Jaime as he emerges from around the corner. 

“Oh hells,” he says quietly, spotting Arya. “Um... hi?”

Arya sits there in shock for a few moments, eyes darting back and forth between them. Brienne is beginning to think something is wrong, the room is so quiet. Until finally Arya all but shouts, “Oh my fucking gods, finally.”

She stands up from the floor, throwing down the wrench she’d been holding, laughing giddily. “Sansa! Sansa!” she cheers, running around Jaime and Brienne to throw open her sister’s door. Sansa pulls a pillow over her head to block out the noise. “Wake _up_ Sansa. It happened.”

“What happened?” Sansa murmurs sleepily. 

“ _It_.”

“It?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oh my gods.”

And then both of the girls are rushing out towards the kitchen, grinning like idiots as Brienne and Jaime are still rubbing the sleep from their eyes, trying to figure out why there is suddenly so much enthusiasm in the room. 

“Oh my gods, you guys?” Sansa gushes, shaking both of their shoulders. “We’ve waited months for this. _Literal. Months_.”

“She’s not even exaggerating,” Arya adds. “I mean, I can’t even tell how much work I had to do to get you here. And Sansa hardly helped with any of it, I mean—“

“Wait a minute,” Brienne interrupts, face scrunching in confusion. “What do you mean, ‘work you had to do’?”

Both of their grins begin to fade. 

“Oh, well, now that really is just the funniest story.” Sansa begins nervously. “Um... You know how a few things around the apartment have seemed um... just a tad bit faulty from time to time?”

“Yeah...” Brienne says, starting to see where this is going. 

“Well Arya may or may not have had something to do with most of it.”

“Hey! This was your idea,” Arya says indignantly.

“Wait,” Jaime starts, finally awake enough to join the conversation. He turns to Arya. “Are you saying that you’ve purposefully been breaking things so that I’d have to come over. And then what? We’d end up sleeping together?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“I can’t believe this.”

Arya scoffs. “You should have seen the two of you the first time the sink broke. I wasn’t responsible for that one, but the sexual—“

Sansa clears her throat. 

“Fine. The _romantic_ tension was very distracting.”

“ _So_ , Arya and I hatched a little plan,” Sansa adds. “It was just to get the two of you to spend a little more time together. A little… push. In the right direction.” 

“Oh my gods, okay.” Brienne takes a deep breath. “What all did you do?” She asks, almost afraid of the answer. 

“Um,” Ayra says. “Well basically everything that broke in the kitchen or the bathroom. I actually had to learn a lot about the plumbing system in this building. Did you know that—”

“Arya.”

“Sorry, sorry. Uh... I also snuck into your room once to mess with the light. Then I kept unscrewing the sprinkler head outside, the one closest to our door... Oh! I almost forgot. I put fertilizer on the lawn across from Brienne’s window for a couple months, but I stopped doing that because it was way too expensive.”

Jaime groans. “Do you know how much work I could have avoided if it weren’t for you two? Seven hells. I should... I don’t know, keep your security deposit or something.”

“Whoa, whoa. Okay,” Sansa cuts in. “Let’s not jump to extremes just yet. Besides, Jaime, all that hard work has been worth it right? I’m sure the last few days or, _you know_ , how ever long it’s been with Brienne have been amazing.”

Jaime grins “A month.”

“Wait, what?” Arya says. 

“We’ve been together almost a month.” He looks down at his wrist as if he has a watch, and Brienne rolls her eyes. “It’ll be a month in just a couple hours, actually.”

“So you’re telling me I’ve been getting up early almost every day to break something for a month when I didn’t need to? Do you know how hard it is to damage things around here and make it look like an accident or normal wear and tear? I mean, someone could have told us!”

The arguments continue on for another half hour or so. It doesn’t stop until their neighbor Podrick knocks on the door, wondering what all the noise is about so early on a weekend. He congratulates Jaime and Brienne when Sansa tells him what happened. Brienne invites him inside for coffee, and they spend the rest of the morning bickering back and forth lightheartedly.

Later, when Sansa and Arya leave to pick up groceries for the homemade dinner they promised to make to apologize for their meddling, Brienne looks out upon the neatly mowed lawn outside her window. It isn’t long before Jaime sidles up behind her, pulling her into his arms and kissing her cheek. They stay there for a while, and she wonders if things would have turned out differently had they not been tricked into spending time with each other all summer. If they never had to deal with any broken fridges or lights or sprinklers. If she never saw him outside her window every other day, turning the lawn mower back and forth as he danced to the music in his head. What if he never threw his arm out in college? What if her dad never got sick, and Brienne never moved back home? Would they have found each other again?

In the end, she supposes it doesn’t really matter.

“Were you ever serious about keeping their security deposit?” Brienne hums, lacing her fingers with his over her stomach.

He chuckles, and the sound brushes delightfully in her ears. “Nah. Sansa was right. This is worth every repair.”

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Comical, unconventional matchmaking schemes with triumphant grins. (Yeah, I didn't want to give that away at the beginning.)
> 
> Hope you liked it! A few more quick notes:  
> 1) Title is from "the 1" by Taylor Swift. The song doesn't necessarily fit this story, but I liked the lyric.  
> 2) The sprinkler soccer game was Jaime's favorite game he went to in high school, if only because he got to see a certain someone in a wet, white shirt.  
> 3) Tragically, Brienne's book was irreparably damaged during the "sprinkler incident." But it's okay because Jaime buys her another copy.


End file.
